Archive of Our Own ^beta

"Athelstan?" A voice cuts through the swirl of his thoughts. With a great deal of effort he opens his eyes again and sees the pale blur of a face hovering above him. It splits into two blurs, then melds back together into one again.

I am seeing things, he thinks. A vision. It's happened before.

"Ragnar?" he mutters, and his heart sinks. He's come back. He's heard about Athelstan's failure.

But he blinks hard, and it's a woman's face he sees. A frowning one, bathed in candlelight. "It's me," says Lagertha. "Don't talk - and don't move, are you mad?" she adds, as he tries to sit up and yelps in pain.

"I've been hurt," he says. She has to know, someone has to know soon or he'll surely die... "I - there's an arrow - "

"There was far more than that," says Lagertha, her frown deepening. "Lie still, will you? You'll start to bleed again."

Athelstan swallows hard, trying to calm himself. Now he can at least tell he isn't in the dark woods, slumped against tree roots and clinging to consciousness, and he isn't surrounded by the rival earl's men - that alone would be cause for celebration, if he had the strength for it. Instead he's inside, the wooden beams of the ceiling above him familiar now that he's awake enough to notice. The hall, of course. The bed he normally occupies when he spends nights there. A wax candle flickers and dances from somewhere near his bed. It must be night.

A straw mattress is beneath him, a heavy bundle of sheepskins and blankets drawn up over his bare chest and his right arm strapped firmly across it in a sling. If he tries to move it so much as an inch he quickly grows lightheaded with gnawing pain.

"Where is Ragnar?" he croaks out.

Something shifts in Lagertha's face, that he can't read. "Near. It was he who brought you back, after those fools of men left you abandoned."

Her words bring a sick swoop into his stomach. He closes his eyes, struggling not to let the memories overwhelm him.

I tried to make them listen, he thinks. I tried. I knew I couldn't, but I tried...

But he brought him back. Ragnar brought him back. He didn't deserve it.

Forgive me, he thinks, Oh God, forgive me.

He shifts again and a stab of pain slices through his shoulder. An arrow had taken Haakon too...he battles nausea as the image of it piercing his eye swims through his head. The old man had believed in him, if no one else had.

"Haakon is dead," he says quietly. "I - I saw him die. I was with him - "

Lagertha lays a hand gently on his uninjured shoulder. "Save your words. You need rest now; there is little more that can be done for you if you don't let yourself heal. Haakon was a wise man and a skilled warrior - the gods will care for him well."

The strangeness that it's her here with him and no one else finally sinks in. "Why are you here? I thought you were defending Hedeby."

Her lips tighten to a thin line. "We are little safer there than anywhere else. I have brought my people here, for a time, so together with Ragnar we can decide what to do next."

Athelstan frowns, trying to keep his head wrapped around what she's saying. "How bad has it been there?"

"We won't talk of that now. When you are better."

"I need to find Ragnar," Athelstan repeats, but when he tries to sit for the second time his vision goes black around the edges. Lagertha shoves him back down again, harder than before. "I told you to stay put, priest. Ragnar can wait."

Breathing hard, Athelstan closes his eyes again, too feeble to fight the sting rising behind them. How could he have been such a fool?

It's Ragnar who is the fool, not you, he thinks, somewhere in the darker corners of his mind. But he cannot say that aloud. He'll take the blame, it's far easier and neater than placing it on his best friend's head.

But he had asked Ragnar not to send him - came very close to begging him not to. That was a fact.

"Keep me here, where I can advise you," he'd told him. "You have sent away all your best fighters elsewhere - and I have never been one of them. Wait until the raiding party returns from the west, at least."

But his friend had given him a look that - long though he'd lived with the Norsemen and seen many that were fiercer - had unnerved him. Ragnar had been in a vicious and unpredictable mood of late - Thor-like, Athelstan had thought privately. And who could blame him with unrest on all sides of his kingdom?

"I will send who I like", he'd said gruffly. "Do you think I should not trust you? Have you given me reason not to trust you, priest?"

The way he approached Athelstan then, the glint in his eyes when he looked down at him, brought back all too strong memories of their first meeting. There was a breathless moment where he had to forcibly remind himself that he and Ragnar were no longer enemies. That this was only a mood, one of which his friend had often.

"You can trust me," he said quietly. "You can trust me as your advisor, but I doubt other men will trust me as their leader whatever you might think. In their eyes I am still a Christian - "

"They will listen to me," said Ragnar, infuriatingly confident. "I am their king. If I tell them you are to lead them into battle, they will follow you."

Athelstan may have been less of a fighter than his fellows, but in that moment he had to work very hard at not letting himself break something. "And if they don't? It would be far more beneficial to give this job to another." He paused. "You sent Torstein away - "

"After you had advised me not to. So how can you know I plan to take your advice at all, even if you do remain?"

Athelstan closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Once. Twice. "You will have sent everyone away who is close to you, save for your wife and sons, if you do this," he said. "Why, Ragnar?"

Ragnar didn't look at him, giving a twitchy half shrug. "We are besieged," he said. "The Gotlanders think us weak, and mean to humiliate me. And the earl of Guthbrand thinks he can get away with raiding our lands. My lands." There was a map on his table - carefully made with Athelstan's help - that he stared down at, so intently it was as if he wished to burn it to ash with his gaze alone.

Then he looked up at Athelstan, still as menacing as ever. "Do you know how hard it is? To be tied to this hall and that chair?" he nodded carelessly to the fur-covered bench he had taken as a throne. "I would like with all my heart to make corpses of Guthbrand and all his dogs, to take on the Gotlanders myself - but I am king of these people now. It is my duty to remain here, to protect Kattegat. That duty belongs not to you, not to my brother, not to any of my fiercest warriors. To me."

He came closer, eyes piercing into Athelstan's head. "Your duty is to remain loyal to your king. Would you disobey me?"

Athelstan held his gaze. "I would not."

"Then you are going to Guthbrand. And you are bringing me the leader of the rebels, alive."

That was days ago now. Athelstan does not know how many. "Lagertha," he says, turning his head as much as he can to look up at her, "how long has it been? How long since..."

She adjusts a wool blanket where it's fallen from his shoulder. "Ragnar brought you back two days ago. You were barely alive."

Two days, he thinks grimly. It took Christ three to rise from the dead.

He can't recall being brought back. All he remembers after the night in the woods is pain and darkness and voices he wasn't sure if he knew.

"What - how bad - "

"You took an arrow through your shoulder, and one in the leg, and many wounds besides that," she says. Athelstan can't help but notice her voice is far gentler than what he is used to, and his heart sinks. Has his state worried her so badly?

"And Ragnar - "

"Yes, he went looking for you - after the rest of his men came back laden with stolen goods, but without any sign of Guthbrand. He was not pleased."

It gives him the barest satisfaction to know that, at the very least, Ragnar was as frustrated as he had been with the company he'd taken north.

"Here - " Lagertha takes a cup in one hand, and helps him lift his head with the other. He's so weak even that is exhausting, but he gratefully accepts the water she holds to his lips.

One of her hands rests on his blankets. "You have lost much blood. You will need plenty of rest." She pauses, regarding him shrewdly. "Ragnar has worried. I have worried. I am relieved to see you recovering, as will he be when I tell him."

"Ragnar will hate me," he blurts out. It isn't until he says it that he feels how true the thought is and has been. The sting behind his eyes grows, paired with a lump in his throat. "I failed him."

Lagertha lets out a sharp breath through her nose. "Ragnar has been in an unreasonable temper, I have heard. He can be the most stubborn, impatient man in this world at the best of times - I know, I was married to him. You are not to be blamed for his foolish choices. If anything it should be you hating him, at least for a short time."

But Athelstan cannot summon the strength to blame Ragnar now. His shoulder throbs and his leg throbs and every bone aches, and all he can manage to think is that his pain can only be some sort of punishment.

"Priest," says Lagertha, not unkindly but with a hint of her old sternness, "I can read your face as easily as you read that holy book of yours. Do not blame yourself for what happened. You did all that was required of you - and it seems you are the only one who did."

"I tried to hold them off on my own," he says, unsure if he's trying to convince her or himself. He tries to swallow the lump in his throat. "When the others deserted...I didn't. I tried to fight."

When he'd taken his first arrow wound, when Haakon had fallen dead beside him, he had been certain he'd be next. And when the earl of Guthbrand's men had surrounded him where he staggered, he'd barely managed to whisper a final prayer to whichever god may be listening before he'd given a strangled yell and swung at them.

The fight hadn't been a long one. One of him and many of them...he'd managed to kill a few and injure more, but there was little to be done. At some point they must have believed him dead because they left him where he was to seek out the remainder of the men he'd brought with him. Even though most of them had scattered by then, having taken the loot they'd come for, not caring that Athelstan's - and Ragnar himself's - orders had been otherwise.

I tried to warn him, Athelstan thinks. One of those pointless tears leaks out of his eye. I warned him the others would not obey the plan. I warned him I was a weak leader. He ought to have known. I did try.

"Oh, Athelstan." The mattress creaks as Lagertha shifts closer to him. Her thumb brushes the place where the tear landed. "I am sure you fought well. You are no coward. Is that what you want to hear?"

I am a coward. But that is not what matters. "I thought I could - could keep them in line. I've never been a leader. I only wanted to do as he wanted and do it well, even if I knew it was foolish. But I failed. I failed."

He hears Lagertha sigh. "You have failed no one. But you are still weary and in pain, and I think once you have healed some more these thoughts will not trouble you so much."

What if he wants the thoughts to trouble him? He feels he more than deserves them.

Lagertha is trying to lift his head again. "The healer left this with you. It will ease your pain."

She spoons a bitter mixture of herbs into his mouth, and he tries not to wince. The relentless throb in his shoulder begins to dull almost immediately, but with it the fog in his head increases. He mutters a word of thanks and Lagertha shushes him.

It isn't hard to close his eyes again. His limbs feel weighted, iron-bound. Something has drained out of him, the last few days and hours leaving him more exhausted than he's ever been in his life. Everything feels like a horrible blur, one he wishes were a dream. A long, bitter rope twisted of things he'd rather forget.

Lagertha's hand rests against his forehead. "I can only stay a little longer, I must go soon. You just rest, someone will check on you."

Athelstan manages only a small sound in response. She might give his shoulder a final squeeze and then he thinks she's gone, but doesn't have the strength to open his eyes and check.

A strange combination of peacefulness and dread washes over him. He longs to speak to Ragnar, to apologize, to tell his friend everything and try to explain himself and apologize some more - but at the same time he never wants to have to face him again. The thoughts battle each other, in slowed and broken fragments.

Light plays outside his eyelids. The tear stings against his temple and more come, silently. In his mind he knows it's just the exhaustion and pain, and the medicine, but he can't help thinking bitterly that his tears are only another weakness.

Christ wept, he thinks.

It's a relief when sleep finally claims him again, spiraling him down into the dark.